Wednesday 6 May 2009

She's got a little list ...

I know that soap opera or comic opera might be a better definition of Gordon Brown's clowns in government.

by johnofgwent

I count live (usually amateur) theatre as a particularly pleasing pastime. I acquired my taste for live stage acts when on the spur of the moment as a younger man staying in London for the weekend I bought tickets to see Paul Daniels on stage, and I have to say that love him or loathe him, he was every bit the consummate professional in the style of old time vaudeville music hall, entirely at ease in a bear pit where no camera tricks, no edits, and nothing except wit, skill and banter can save you from an inglorious end.

And I count evenings watching performances of Gilbert and Sullivan amongst my most entertaining.

So when I heard that our very own Lord High Executioner Jacqui Smith has a "little list" of her own the parallels were not lost on me. Particularly the reason why the Grand PoohBah IS the Grand Poohbah. Disgusted with the slimy way the Lord High executioner has wriggled his way into the job, every government official with honour and dignity resigned their posts, leaving the poor man to do everything.

In Gordon Brown's government of course there is no such honour otherwise cabinet meetings would be a singularly solitary affair.

But back to the list of britain's least wanted. Are any of us surprised to find the Moslem Council Of Great Britain wringing their hands at its publication on the grounds that quite a few of their imams have now been shown to be preachers of hate. However, the list has a few others too, and one of them has decided to sue Jacqui Smith for Defamation

Good luck with that. I say. Not because I feel the man's views are so abhorrent that they must be silences. No, far from it, I would welcome all the people on that list being taken to Hyde Park and given an orange box. I happen to believe that ten minutes later every one of them would be in the Tower for breaching the laws on those in Speakers Corner NOT being allowed to incite riot or violence, laws that predate by a goodly number of decades the pathetic attempts THIS government have brought in to curtail everyone in the name of preventing terrorism and hatred.

No, I say "good luck with that" with deepest irony because both GA and I belonged to a trade organisation that tried to use the courts to bring justice to right the wrongs of Gordon's tax policy in his early years and we failed. And the country now pays the price for that failure of our judges to see sense when thrown at them.

But I post this to draw attention to the last paragraphs of the BBC news page covering this American's desire to turn to litigation to settle what he sees as an outrageous besmirchment of his good character.

The UK has been able to ban people who promote hatred, terrorist violence or serious criminal activity since 2005, but the list was only made public for the first time this week.

Hamas MP Yunis Al-Astal and Jewish extremist Mike Guzovsky are among the 16 named people by the Home Office as being excluded.

Also excluded are two leaders of a violent Russian skinhead gang, the ex-Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Stephen 'Don' Black and neo-Nazi Erich Gliebe.

The remaining six have not been named, as doing so would not be in the public interest, the government said.

"Not In The Public Interest".

Oh really. I wonder why that might be.

I am well beyond the minimum age to recall both Nioxon and Thatcher hiding behind the phrase "for reasons of National Security" when they both actually meant "for reasons of deep personal embarrassment at the depths to which I will stoop to enforce my political ideology on others being made public".

So what have those six people done that makes it "not in our interest" to know of what part of their thoughts make them undesirable.

Do they deliver bath-plugs 24/7/365 ?

Do they run porn film channels ?

Do they run a sideline in estate agency / lettings in the MP's third fouth and fifth home market ?

Or do they have allegations of money laundering in order to fund New Labour hanging over them.

Given the reasons for the rest of the people on that list having their identiies known, I can thionk of few other reasons other than those I sugegst above for why it is in Labour's best interest to keep us unaware of the names of the "hidden six"